Proportional fonts

Proportional fonts

[Ketil Z. M.]

Hi,

Is anybody using proportional fonts with Gnus?  That is, except me?  I
really like the look of a message in Times-Roman, with a somewhat long
line length, but I have a few problems.

I put 'gnus-article-fill-cited-article into the
gnus-article-display-hook (I think it is).  This seems to work ok, but I
have to, I think, set fill-column to some number of characters, which
means the message will jag a lot on the right side, and with lines with
lots of caps or m's the line will wrap.  Ugly.  Fix?

Also, gnus-article-fill-cited-article is not intelligent enough when it
comes to recognizing tables, lists, and the like.  Some simple rules
could surely be added to adress this?  Though I assume tables will be
broken anyway, given the use of spaces - unless, of course, that part of
the article could be displayed in a fixed font.  Same for signature.  Possible?

Last, there's the summary buffer.  Given large differences between with
of spaces, pluses, minuses, and Es, Os, etc, the indentation of articles
is close to useless.  Perhaps the best thing would be to use some fixed
font in this buffer - is that at all possible? 

I use Xemacs, for the moment, but I'll change to GNU any day for the
above improvements.  Comments?  Suggestions?

~kzm

Re: Proportional fonts

[William Perry]

Ketil Z. M. writes:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Is anybody using proportional fonts with Gnus?  That is, except me?  I
> really like the look of a message in Times-Roman, with a somewhat long
> line length, but I have a few problems.
> 
> I put 'gnus-article-fill-cited-article into the
> gnus-article-display-hook (I think it is).  This seems to work ok, but I
> have to, I think, set fill-column to some number of characters, which
> means the message will jag a lot on the right side, and with lines with
> lots of caps or m's the line will wrap.  Ugly.  Fix?

  Wait until XEmacs 19.15? :) Seriously, I'm working on adding some new
primitives to the redisplay of XEmacs that will allow you to do pixel-based
filling.  Well, actually it will be any arbitrary measurement - say: I want
3em of right border, or I want 15pi, etc.  Its trivial to convert between
picas/pixels/inches/points/millimiters, etc. if you have the screen
height/width in both millimiters and pixels, which both Emacs and XEmacs
let you do.

> Also, gnus-article-fill-cited-article is not intelligent enough when it
> comes to recognizing tables, lists, and the like.  Some simple rules
> could surely be added to adress this?  Though I assume tables will be
> broken anyway, given the use of spaces - unless, of course, that part of
> the article could be displayed in a fixed font.  Same for signature.
> Possible?
> 
> Last, there's the summary buffer.  Given large differences between with
> of spaces, pluses, minuses, and Es, Os, etc, the indentation of articles
> is close to useless.  Perhaps the best thing would be to use some fixed
> font in this buffer - is that at all possible? 

  It is with XEmacs... use buffer-local faces.  You can set up a face so
that it is '6x13bold' in one buffer, but times-new-roman-12pt in another.
Use something like:

(set-face-font whatever-var-holds-the-face-you-want "6x13" gnus-summary-buffer)
(set-face-font whatever-var-holds-the-face-you-want
    "times-new-roman-whatever-whatever-whatever-*-*-*-*-*" gnus-article-buffer)

(don't you just love X LFDs?)

> I use Xemacs, for the moment, but I'll change to GNU any day for the
> above improvements.  Comments?  Suggestions?

  I'd say the improvements will happen in XEmacs first, since Emacs has a
ways to go to catch up in the redisplay department first before this really
becomes feasible.  Right now it cannot handle different sized fonts very
well _at all_ - it makes all lines the same height as the largest font you
have assigned to a face - fairly suboptimal. :)

-Bill P.